CBE 255. Introduction to Chemical Process Modeling

Course Overview

This course provides an overview of the chemical engineering
curriculum and develops facility with using modern computational
software for numerical problem solving.

The course provides an integrative overview of the entire
chemical engineering curriculum. The faculty instructors for the
latter courses in the curriculum have identified the key modeling
concepts that they would like students entering their courses to be
exposed to early in their education in our department. We will select
10-12 key topics from this list and structure the course around one
key concept per week. The lectures will introduce these concepts and
the students will immediately begin to apply them in smaller
discussion sections. We will introduce computational tools motivated
by these key concepts. By the end of this course, the students will
have a set of tools that have been selected by the faculty in the
latter courses as most useful to them as instructors.

Technology is an essential component of this course. The college has
invested in classrooms with laptop projection capability and wireless
internet connections. Many engineering undergraduates bring their own
laptops to campus. The department will loan the additional laptops so
every student can bring their laptop to class. The course requires
intensive problem solving in small groups to educate the students in
how to use advanced computational tools for engineering decision
making in complex situations. We envision using undergraduates who
have mastered the course in previous semesters as the leaders for the
smaller discussion sections. The professor in charge of the course
will also cover one discussion section on a rotating basis.

The course may be broken into two parts, with the first part
taught to sophomores and the second part to juniors. In this way, the
students will find almost immediate use of all the tools they have
learned in their next semester courses.

Given the following features: (i) the course provides an integrated
view of the entire curriculum, (ii) the course instructors select the
concepts and computational tools presented, and (iii) the senior
students lead discussion sections with the junior students, we hope to
foster a learning community in the department in which using
technology to solve complex engineering problems becomes an integral
part of our students' educational experience.

Complete collections of the M-files for both Matlab and Octave
in zip or tar.gz file formats are available for download from the
following links: